Wednesday, July 17, 2002

$50 ($100 for new users) per year for a mac.com account? Seems a lot of people don't like the idea o having to pay for something that was formerly free. I was leaning in that direction until I actually looked at what you receive for $50/$100. Cheap, cheap! The BackUp software alone is worth $100. It fits my needs way better than a filesystem backup in that it focuses on backup data by context, not just backing up my entire home account -- 70+% of which I really don't want to have backed up because it is stuff that can easily be restored from external sources (revision control work areas, applications, automatically generated data, caches, etc...). It is easy to configure, easy to use, and can back up to a CD or DVD burner (which I am using more than .mac backups). Very, very cool. I wonder how much bandwidth my $50 has purchased... 3:07:59 PM

Brent Simmons released version 1.0b1 of NetNewsWire Lite. It is awesome. Best news aggregator I have used and it is only beta 1 of the 1.0 release. I'm sure it will only get better from here. I moved all of my Radio UserLand subscriptions into NNW. NNW has two key advantages over Radio besides simply providing a very nice UI for browsing new headlines (as opposed to a linear web interface). First, with NNW I can ask it to poll all RSS feeds at once at any time I like. So, before I take a shower in the morning, I tell NNW to grab all the new news from all the sites I am subscribed to. It does so and I have all the news ready to read when I sit down on the train for my morning commute. Secondly, I can now not run Radio UserLand unless I need to post to my 'blog. Radio has a very bad habit of going to the disk for data on a fairly regular basis (see fs_usage) and, as such, prevents the machine's hard drive from sleeping. As well, Radio tends to cycle between almost 0% CPU usage and prolonged bouts of 25% to 50% CPU usage on a regular basis. 12:55:10 PM